A practical story about building a live vessel-tracking dashboard, hitting real-world data limitations, and turning a failed first location into a better geospatial prototype. I started this project with a simple idea: Can I build a small web app that watches ship movements in a strategic maritime area and turns live AIS data into something useful? The first target was the Strait of Hormuz . That choice made sense on paper. It is one of the most important maritime chokepoints in the world, and it looked like the perfect place to analyse tanker activity, slow traffic, vessel movement, and possible AIS reporting gaps. But then reality showed up. I could not get reliable live AIS signals for the area I selected. Maybe it was my bounding box. Maybe it was provider coverage. Maybe it was filtering. Maybe it was the exact message types I requested. Maybe it was a mix of everything. That is where the project became more interesting.…